This Guy Could Be President

That is, if the president were a comedian, acclaimed actor, and beloved personality who's become famous for crashing kickball games, prank-calling his friends' wives, and busting into the karaoke rooms of gobsmacked (and delighted) constituents. And yet now here's Bill Murray playing FDR, bantering through a Hyde Park accent and cigarette holder, batting away murmurs of another Oscar nomination. But has the comic giant just gotten too damn beloved and too damn acclaimed for his own liking?

If you ever find yourself playing kickball in a New York City park on a pleasant Sunday afternoon—this is no recommendation that you do, kickball being the quintessence of hipster self-infantilization, but if you do find yourself in such a situation—and if, in the middle innings, a strange homeless-looking man appears and asks if he can take a turn at the plate, do not, as may be your temptation, shoo him away in anger and disgust. That man may be Bill Murray.

That we live in a universe in which such rules need stating is the great gift of Bill Murray’s late-stage career. And it’s what went down one brisk day this fall, when a group of twentysomethings playing kickball on Roosevelt Island were suddenly involved in the one-man flash mob that is a Bill Murray Sighting.

"We just figured he was someone’s dad on the other team and kept playing, NBD," one of the participants wrote to Billmurraystory.com, a website devoted to chronicling such ubiquitous and predictably unpredictable events. "The man kicked the ball and ran pretty well to first base, trying to round to second, but one of my teammates chased him back to first, deciding not to attempt to peg the man. That was when everyone on my team realized who he was.... BILL MURRAY DECIDED TO PLAY KICKBALL WITH US!"

Murray made it as far as second base before getting doubled up on a line drive. He gave everybody on the field high fives. He hugged one player’s mother, who was standing on the sidelines, lifting her high into the air. He posed for a group photo that would soon be all over the Internet. (All this, it should be said, after blowing off a GQ photo shoot.) And then he vanished.

It sometimes seems that making movies is merely Murray’s hobby these days, secondary to these kinds of mystic, generous, Dadaist materializations. A pop-culture icon since his mid-twenties, he has emerged lately as something more bizarre and transcendent: a kind of wandering, perpetual performance artist, everywhere and nowhere, wherever the wind or spirit carries him: indie movies, golf tournaments, college frat parties, your karaoke booth right now. As one astute Internet commenter put it: "Some people photo-bomb pictures. Bill Murray photo-bombs life." That it’s nearly impossible to tell the apocryphal sightings from the real ones may be precisely the point.

"I always laugh when people bitch about the subways. It’s like, ’You have no idea,’ " Murray says. It’s a couple of hours after kickball, and still wearing the blue cutoff shorts and loose flannel shirt in which he played, he’s ensconced in a hotel suite high above Manhattan. Murray is big, bigger than you expect, and his presence is bigger yet. He brings to even this, the most sterile of rooms, a kind of crackling kinetic energy, whether perched on the edge of the suite’s round salmon-colored sofa or springing up to pour a cup of coffee from a silver tray. He’s reminiscing about his early days in New York, part of a migration from The Second City in Chicago to The National Lampoon Radio Hour, which paved the way for Saturday Night Live.

"I got here in 1974, just as everything went to shit. Subways were insanely cold in the winter and insanely hot in the summer," he says. "The windows were all open, so you’d get metal filings and dust in your face. It was like being on a prison train, or working in a mine. I used to run all the time. I would get off that train and just start running."

Part of the joy of the city, of being Murray, was talking your way into places you weren’t supposed to be. "You had to wheedle your way in those days. It was like, ’How do I get this experience?’ So you go face-to-face with someone. You make eye contact," he says. "My brother and I crashed the_ Tommy_ premiere party in the subway, which was like the tightest ticket of whatever year... 1975? We had no business being at this thing, but we knew the guys in the kitchen. It was a party in the subway! People talk about it now, and it sounds like fiction." There’s something beautiful about imagining Murray, semi-anonymous, before his adventures were instantly recorded.

"He was kind of scarier then," says producer and writer Mitch Glazer, who was introduced to Murray by John Belushi during Murray’s first weeks on Saturday Night Live. "I didn’t know him very well. He was blazingly funny. But he also seemed angrier."

This is the Murray of legend—punkish, confident, a modern incarnation of a line that stretches from Puck and Pan to Brer Rabbit and Groucho. (Or as Harold Ramis, his longtime, sometimes estranged collaborator and friend, once described it to me, "All the Marx Brothers rolled into one: He’s got the wit of Groucho, the pantomimic brilliance and lasciviousness of Harpo, and the Everyman quality of Chico.") It’s the Murray whose on-screen persona seems undivorceable from his exploits off. And it’s the Murray frankly idolized by men who were a certain age when he was in his prime, men not overly blessed with good looks, wealth, or athletic prowess, for whom the actor seemed to have sprung forth, as surely as John Wayne, with an alternative blueprint for manhood: self-possessed, on the side of good, exquisitely capable of making one’s way through the world. Several years ago, when I went to interview Ramis, he opened the door to his office, chuckled, and said something to the effect of "They always look like you." I imagine that Murray must feel the same way today; guys like me have been coming expectantly to see him for decades.

So fundamental is Murray’s face to us longtime acolytes that trying to describe it is like trying to describe the taste of salt. It is the root to its own adjective, the answer to its own question. What does salt taste like? Salty! What does Bill Murray look like? Amazingly Bill-Murray-ish. As a young man, he already had what seemed to me the enviable crags and hollows of hard experience. Now that he’s 62, his face is a ball of crumpled newsprint framed by a trim gray beard and a thinning but still unruly shrub of hair.

Above all, he remains supremely aware of the effect he has on others, a scholar of eye contact and personal space. It is his genius. "It’s not so much what you do, but the way in which you do it. I can slap you on the back and it can be a wonderful thing, if it’s done with joy," he says. "But if I slap you on the back just as you’re coming out of the elevator, and I’ve had too much to drink, it’s a completely different thing."

This is the most obvious connection to the role he plays in his upcoming film _Hyde Park on Hudson, _which at first might appear an unusual part for Murray. FDR, as he plays him, is a deceptively doddering manipulator of both the big stage (deftly paving the way for the U.S.’s entrance into World War II) and the small (assembling a willing harem of doting mistresses at his Hyde Park estate). The night before, at _Hyde Park’_s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Murray had sat, with other cast members, for a post-screening Q&A. The thirty-second president, he told the sedate art-house crowd, had balls. "I actually don’t use that word much. Guts isn’t right, either," he says now. His voice, with its latent Chicago accent, is like an instrument tuned half a note off, but nevertheless musical. "I should have said he had sand. I like sand because it has gravity to it. There’s something solid down at the bottom. It’s like the clown that you can punch and he sits right back up again."

Glazer and Murray became close while working on Scrooged, the 1988 take on A Christmas Carol written by Glazer and former SNL head writer Michael O’Donoghue. Glazer has come to bear the brunt of Murray’s lack of official representation; for many years the actor has relied instead on an 800 number and a voice-mail box on which potential suitors may leave pleading messages. Glazer is known as the man to call if you want to get a script into the actor’s hands. He also bears the brunt of Murray’s pranks. Glazer’s wife, the actress Kelly Lynch, revealed in an interview last fall that Murray and his brothers call the couple’s house anytime they catch the sex scene between Lynch and Patrick Swayze in Road House on TV.

"It’s totally true. No matter what time, two in the morning, it’s ’Patrick Swayze’s fucking your wife right now. Oh... He’s pushing her up against the wall.’ It was kind of funny, the first dozen or so times," Glazer says. He calls his friend "the Murricane."

Like others in the actor’s orbit, Glazer seems to take such incidents less as the price than the bonus of Life with Bill. He recounts a classic anecdote when the actor dragged O’Donoghue and him to Rancho La Puerta, the tony vegetarian health spa in Baja California. "We were like the only three men there, among all these Beverly Hills housewives," Glazer remembers. On the final day, a middle-aged woman guest approached Murray for an autograph. "Okay," he told her. "But then I get to throw you in the pool."

The woman laughed and accepted the autograph. Then she dropped into what Glazer recalls as "a civil rights resistance pose," screaming as Murray, a man of his word, dragged her toward the pool. He deposited her as promised.

"He’d made the deal and that was it," Glazer recalls, in a statement that seems to confirm the authenticity of the entire Murray oeuvre, real-world adventures included. "He’s always been that way. Even in the beginning. He’s always been...pure."

"I woke up this morning wondering if I’d sold my soul last night to the guy from Focus Features," Murray says, taking a sip of coffee and staring into the cup. "I really didn’t know."

He’s referring to the studio publicist for Hyde Park on Hudson, who had to wrangle Murray into this suite to answer questions about the movie. The actor is famously allergic to the conventional machinery of Hollywood promotion. Would-be interviewers find themselves acting more like lepidopterists, trying to anticipate his flitting path and then hoping against hope that he’ll alight on a nearby flower for a moment or two. (This is why Murray profiles so often focus on how your profile-sausage is made; for the record, your sausage is made from the frozen smiles and glazed eyes of people like the Guy from Focus Features.)

"They look at this film as an award-winning film, and that road is paved with glass and razor wire, as far as I’m concerned," he says.

For the bulk of Murray’s career, such complications weren’t an issue. Then came his bravura, career-redefining turn in Lost in Translation in 2003—a role that brilliantly flipped the dynamic of his early roles: the buried melancholy and soul coming to the surface while virility and spontaneity became subtext. (It’s both bizarre and telling that the film makes you accept Murray’s character as a onetime action star and sex symbol.) He won nearly every award that year, but lost the Academy Award for best actor to Sean Penn. It remains, it seems, a confusing and troubling experience to him. And now, with his performance in Hyde Park being positioned as another Oscar contender, it’s fresh in his mind.

"The one time I got a bunch of prizes, I just assumed I’d win them all," he says, rubbing his legs thoughtfully. "Because I’d been winning them all. I wasn’t disappointed or anything, but I was surprised."

About six months later, however, he had a vivid realization: "I really saw something in myself and I thought, ’Oh, my God. I really did want that thing!’ Some part of me was disappointed that I got tricked into thinking it was important. I told myself, if that happens again, I don’t want to do that." He stares down at the table. "I’ve since realized that it was good I didn’t win, because I wasn’t ready. Guys go for five years without working because they’re thinking, ’Oh, this isn’t Oscar-worthy.’ They become paralyzed. So. It would have fed that thing that I found in myself, without my even knowing. It would have been really malformed. Because I had it wrong."

A knock comes at the hotel-suite door. Murray has a full arsenal of strategies to deal with the publicists trying to hasten him on to the next in a long line of events that will culminate in traveling to England tomorrow, to screen Hyde Park at the BFI London Film Festival. "Go away! Go clean another room!" Murray shouts. Footsteps meekly retreat. "I didn’t mean it," he says, much lower. He rolls his eyes.

A few minutes later, the publicist is back, this time having learned not to knock. "So, Bill, we have to go to the thing," she begins.

"Oh, the thing." Murray snaps his fingers. "I see what you’re talking about now. The thing."

"Would you like a little ice cream, Brett?" He raises an eyebrow conspiratorially. "We’d really like a little ice cream."

"I’ll see what I can do," says the publicist. She retreats, never to return.

The question of Oscar is one part of a constellation of questions about where Bill Murray the actor goes from here. He has found a home as a kind of living prop in Wes Anderson’s movies, paring his exuberance down to an almost radical minimalism. Films like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in which he played a fractured Jacques Cousteau, are closer to comedies than they might appear, Murray says, as intellectually tuned to the dynamics of comedy as he is instinctive. "Every single scene of that movie was funny, but when Wes assembled it, he streamlined and excised the detonation point of the laughter. The idea is you keep it bouncing and never skim the energy off of it. You keep it building in the name of a big emotional payoff—which comes when they’re all in the submarine together and they see the jaguar shark."

He’s made an easy accommodation to Anderson’s tightly controlled style, a distinct contrast to the freewheeling improvisation of his younger days. "Wes really knows what he wants. It’s not like, ’Get the ham out there and let him oink,’ " he says. "Those limitations make it more challenging: ’If I have to be in this box, how do I make it work? What can I do to make it really zip?’ " In last year’s Moonrise Kingdom, he delivered as zippy and soulful a performance for Anderson as he has since the sublimity of Rushmore, their first project together. Reports from the Rome Film Festival, where Roman Coppola’s feature A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III debuted in November, suggest he does the same alongside Charlie Sheen.

And yet, for the past decade, the one area Murray has failed to find an assured place is in comedies that announce themselves as comedies. When I ask why, he’s silent for a full fifteen seconds. "They’re different," he says finally. "They’re just different from what I used to do." He’s right. On the surface—and, one suspects, in the minds of their makers—movies like The Hangover and _Knocked Up _are directly in the lineage of Murray’s classics: Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day. But if those earlier movies are about being a man and negotiating the world, the dominant theme of the newer ones is about avoiding it, staying a boy—albeit a boy raised on the films of Bill Murray.

Glazer says Murray is continually approached by comedy directors but has found few projects he feels are worth doing. "I assume if he found them amusing, he’d do them," he says. (One exception that Murray is particularly fond of was Zombieland, in which he played himself during the zombie apocalypse, the conceit being that he donned zombie drag in order to move about freely, a not-terrible metaphor for his relationship to the straight, non-Murray world now.)

Still, comedy appears to be something the actor genuinely misses. "The early movies, we just did them for fun. If they were funny, you did them. There wasn’t this life-or-death thing," he says. "I was in movies where I would turn up, and they’d be like, ’Whaddya got?’ It was like, ’Turn on two cameras and let’s go.’ " In this light, it’s hard not to see his recent mode of real-life exploits as the ercise of a disused muscle, a way to do off the screen what he no longer gets the chance to do on it.

"It’s really a question I have. I think there’s something that I can bring to a comedy today, but I don’t know where to bring it," he says. "I’ve actually thought about having a manager again. Just to clear my head and have a plan." He pauses, as if working it out in his mind. "Eh, it’s not that attractive to have a plan. I know that if I ever feel that I need to make a funny movie, I’ll figure out how to write one. I’ll get it done. If I ever get some ambition, I’m gonna get some shit done."

He does a mock-offended eye roll/blink. "What? It could happen."

It could. And, maybe selfishly, I wish it would. Not because Murray’s later performances, on- and offscreen, aren’t full of delights, but because the notion of his passing into a genteel old age of masterful but dutiful roles in Oscar movies would—not to make too much of it—feel like something akin to the death of the universe.

During the Hyde Park Q&A, a tactful young cineast had risen to ask about a scene in which FDR goes for a swim, his crippled body suddenly graceful in water, the camera regarding his wasted legs as they float by. What kinds of special effects, the questioner wanted to know, were used to make those legs quite so unbelievably gnarled and horrible looking?

It was immediately clear, from the laughter among the others onstage, that the answer was none. Murray was silent for a long moment and then reached down for that fathomless gear of deadpan to which perhaps only he, since Buster Keaton, has access. "That," he said finally, "is acting."

Now he tells the story of his morning on Roosevelt Island—except not about the kickball game. I will have to learn about that later, on the Internet. Instead, he talks about the original reason for the trip, where he went first: to see the recently completed FDR Four Freedoms memorial, located on the tip of the island (where, he mentions, an unfilmed scene in Ghostbusters was meant to be set). He had seen a documentary about the project on PBS and, having recently channeled the president, decided to take his sons and their friends for a look.

"It was designed by Louis Kahn, and it’s got some moves," he says, flipping through photos on his phone and shaking his head, impressed. "This is what they call The Room," he says, passing the phone. "There’s six-by-six-by-twelve-foot granite blocks with a tiny bit of space between them that’s polished on the inside, so the light actually kicks through the whole thing. The Room is pretty boss."

The only problem was that the memorial was in the final stages of construction and not yet open, so they crept around the edges, looking for a way in. A perfect setup for a little of that Murray magic.

"I waved to the people driving in and out in their itty-bitty cars, and eventually I saw one of the guys walking back, saying, ’They said you were out here.’ " Murray seems suddenly sheepish, as if hearing how it sounds: just another celebrity getting through doors on the strength of his face—not with wit and charm and guile, not with sand.

"It wasn’t like they were like, ’Hey, you’re the guy from What About Bob?’ or anything. One guy didn’t speak very much English, and they obviously weren’t really movie buffs...," he says, rubbing those legs gingerly. A mere guard, he’ll have you know, is still no match for the power of the Murricane. He’d have made it through the gate.

"I had that," he says with perfect confidence. "If I had a little more time, I could have gotten it done."

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